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There was a power failure earlier today, and now my system won't boot anymore. It shows the following error message and drops me to a root shell to try and recover the data for myself:

Log of fsck -C -R -A -a
Sat Jul 30 12:56:49 2016

fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
fsck.ext4: No such file or diretory while trying to open /dev/sdc1
Possibly non-existent device?
/dev/sdb3: clean, 3040/61054976 files, 178253587/244189696 blocks
fsck died with exit status 8

Sat Jul 30 12:56:49 2016

/dev/sdc is my storage hard drive. I checked in the BIOS and it is still detected there. But when Debian boots and drops me to the shell, I can't find /dev/sdc anywhere, let alone /dev/sdc1.

Is there any hope at all to recover my data? It's mostly things I can re-download, but it also had a few virtual machines and their backups.

I'm not sure where to take it from there. I would fsck the partition but I can't see it at all, it's like /dev/sdc doesn't even exist anymore and the drive isn't plugged in as far as Debian is concerned.

Any ideas?

user306802
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1 Answers1

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Here is what I did:

Boot the machine with a sysrescuecd LiveCD and check the devices with fdisk -l.

There, I could see that sda was the SSD system disk, and sdb was the 1TB storage disk. So my assumptions were wrong, I thought the storage disk was sdc.

Then I mounted /dev/sda1 which is the system partition. I went to check /etc/fstab and noticed there was a /dev/sdc1 to be mounted at /backup. I'm not sure why that was, maybe a misconfiguration a while ago. This machine hadn't restarted in over 4 months, so I guess I didn't notice until now.

/dev/sdc was indeed not present in the system. So I removed it from /etc/fstab, unmounted /dev/sda1 and restarted.

Everything went fine then. Debian was freaking out because it was being told to mount /dev/sdc1 at /backup but it couldn't find that device, which had long been disconnected from the machine.

As usual, the computer was right and the human was wrong!

user306802
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